– Avoid Flashterbation (haha!!)
– Make your search box easy to find and put it in a place that’s obvious on the page
– Don’t have competing search boxes
– Don’t tell people about advanced search

4. Show Just Enough

– Make sure you don’t cut yourself short in your result choices
– At the same time don’t overload with unnecessary the results

5. Keep Up, or Get Out

– There is hope: 57 percent of companies are planning to increase investment on site search
– Use customer satisfaction surveys (like ForeSee) to make sure you are doing a good job

Lee is up next.

In the past, users came in from home pages and navigated easily to where they wanted to go. Now, people come in to different pages within the site and can easily get lost. Lee agrees that onsite search can make it a lot easier for users to convert.

Tips for Onsite Search

– Use above the fold space wisely
– Limit text
– Always show potential products
– Use synonyms and misspellings
– Provide search suggestions
– Provide search/nav options
– Filters should never be in the way of products (only 2 percent of people use them)
– Highlight your hits to make things easier to find

Key Takeaways

– Recognize that users aren’t starting on your home page
– Make on-site search a priority
– Constantly look to optimize your onsite search as you do with your search marketing

John steps up to the podium next.

Online research is driving commerce, but it’s important to remember that 50 percent of people who research online, still purchase in store.

Your position in search engines are really important, even more so with online retail. Seventy percent of shoppers click on products in top positions in the search engines so you need to be placed well whether it’s on your site or the search engines. Interestingly, users interact with retail search the same way as search engines, so applying learnings from search engines to onsite search is really important to do.

Last up is Nitin who’s going to share some interesting numbers with us.

Important Tips

– The faster the search response time, the better
– 60 percent of people find site search optimization to be the second most effective way to boost sales
– 42 percent of visitors to online retail sites say the first thing they do is type the product name or category into the site search box

Search is an online shopper’s best friend, so it’s important to get right. Mobile is also emerging as a source of online retail sales: one in five shoppers said they intended to use their cell phones to shop during the holiday season.

Well, that’s all from Day 2 folks. Go grab your hats and a beer or two.

This live blog post was written by guest blogger Imelda Khoo. Imelda is the E-Marketing Manager at Tektronix, responsible for global SEO, PPC and social media. Imelda blogs at SEM Booty and is also on Twitter @imeldak

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.